Texas BlogWire

January 06, 2005

Digby on torture

Bush's nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be our next Attorney General has brought the subject of Americans torturing terrorist suspect back into the news. Digby has an excellent post on this:

Every person alive in America today grew up with the belief that
torture is wrong. Popular culture, religion, folklore and every other
form of cultural instruction for decades in this country has taught
that it is wrong, from sermons and lectures to films about slavery to
photographs of Auschwitz to crime shows about serial killers. It is
embedded in our consciousness. We teach our children that it is wrong
to torture animals and other kids. We don't say that there are
exceptions for when the animals or kids are really, really bad. We have
laws on the books that outright outlaw it. The words "cruel and
unusual" are written into our constitution.

The problem is not
that there isn't a widely accepted admonition not to conduct torture,
it's that many people, as with all crimes, will choose to ignore the
admonition under certain circumstances. However, that does not mean
that they do not know that what they are doing is wrong. There is
nothing surprising in that. It's why we have laws.

The arguments for torture being raised by the right are rationalizations
for what they know is immoral and illegal conduct. Their discomfort
with the subject clearly indicates that they don't really want to
defend it. (Witness the pathetic dance that even that S&M freak
Rush Limbaugh had to do after his comments were widely disseminated.)
Will they admit that they know it's wrong? Of course not. But when they
take up their manly jihad and accuse the Democrats of being swooning
schoolgirls they will also be forced to positively defend
something that many of them know very well is indefensible. And every
time they do that their credibility on values and morals is chipped
away a little bit.

I don't expect them to change their tune.
Way too much of this comes from a defect in temperament and garden
variety racism and that's not going to go away. But Democrats have to
thicken their skins and be prepared for the usual attacks and insist
over and over again that it is against the values and principles of the
United States to torture people, period. It is not only right, it is
smart.

As I wrote below, the opposition will bluster and
fidget and scream bloody murder. But listen to the tenor of their
arguments. The WSJ [Wall Street Journal] article below rails against the "glib abuse of the
word" as if they can run away from the issue by engaging in a game of
semantics. They are reduced to claiming that unless we torture it will
be unilateral disarmament. We, the most powerful military force the
world has ever known, will be defeated by a bunch of third world
religious misfits if we don't engage in torturing suspects. Just who
sounds weak?